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GOLDEN_FOOD

                                             August 30, 2019

                                                        GOLDEN_JOURNEY
In the Saint story "The Golden Journey",
we're shown people doing a six day hike
back in the early 1930s.

In that time period, I would've expected hikers
to be surviving on things like cheese and salami,
perhaps with some nuts, raisins and chocolate.

This is not, in fact, that far off from what
Charteris describes:

   "Simon ... opened his pack and produced food coarse
   black bread and butter, cheese and liver sausage."

But there's also a lot of stage
business about frying eggs...       Templar is supposed to be carrying
                                    a frying pan.  But he says his pack
The Saint gives advice on how       weighs "25 pounds", which I find
to make scrambled eggs:             hard to believe--

  "Like everything else, there's a trick       But then he doesn't seem to be
  in it.  You've got to remember that a        carrying a change of clothes
  scrambled egg goes on cooking itself         even: they take a day off just
  after you take it off the fire, so if        for washing up-- supposedly
  you try to finish them in the pan            because his shirt has gone foul.
  they're hard and crumbly when you serve
  them.  Take them off while they still              (We might guess he's
  look half raw, and they end up just                working his companion
  fine and juicy."                                   hard, but then giving her
                                                     long breaks to recover...)

Now, that sounds like a plausible phenomena,
but it seems to me you'd have to be making a    It also sounds like
hell of a lot of scrambled eggs before the      the Saint prefers his
residual heat would matter that much.  Are      eggs very runny, but
they supposed to be scrambling a half-dozen     then he's British.
eggs every morning?

How many eggs are they supposed to be
packing with them?

   A closer reading though shows that they're not
   exactly all that isolated-- they're camping
   out, but very close to an Inn where they just
   had some beer.  It's not stated, but they very
   well could have bought eggs there, or somewhere
   near it.   In general, the route Templar is on
   allows ample opportunity to restock food supplies,
   which helps to explain how you could travel for
   six days with a 25 pound pack.



         I kept having this
         cognitive dissonance
         between *my* idea of a                                        
         wilderness hiking trip          In Backpacking circa-1970s you        
         and what's going on in          carry everything you need (except     
         the story.                      water)-- and carry all your trash     
                                         out with you-- and hiking near        
         The vibe seems more to          enough to civilization to buy         
         me like "car camping"           food would be looked down on          
         in many places in the           (and not possible if you're in        
         story.                          the middle of a National Park).       
                                                                               
                                                                              



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